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July 29, 2007
Cheney, the all-around tough guy, rules Bush and is the one behind the talk about Saddam's mushroom clouds and the Evil Labs of Dr. Germ and Mrs. Anthrax.
Steve Bell
The tough guy doesn't doesn't negotiate with the bad guys. He stiffs them, as the Americans would say. However, as Peter Galbraith points out in the New York Review of Books:
The Iraq war is lost. Of course, neither the President nor the war's intellectual architects are prepared to admit this. Nonetheless, the specter of defeat shapes their thinking in telling ways.The case for the war is no longer defined by the benefits of winning—a stable Iraq, democracy on the march in the Middle East, the collapse of the evil Iranian and Syrian regimes—but by the consequences of defeat. ...Tellingly, the Iraq war's intellectual boosters, while insisting the surge is working, are moving to assign blame for defeat.
Defeat is defined by America's failure to accomplish its objective of a self-sustaining, democratic, and unified Iraq. And that failure has already taken place, along with the increase of Iranian power in the region.
Iraq after an American defeat will look very much like Iraq today—a land divided along ethnic lines into Arab and Kurdish states with a civil war being fought within its Arab part.
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